Glycine-N-acyltransferase (GLYAT) is differentially expressed in brain metastatic breast cancer.

Abstract

Metastasis to the brain is a clinical problem in patients with breast cancer (1-3). We mined published microarray data (4, 5) to compare primary and metastatic tumor transcriptomes to discover genes associated with brain metastasis in patients with metastatic breast cancer. We found that the glycine-N-acyltransferase, encoded by GLYAT, was among the genes whose expression was most different in the brain metastases of patients with metastatic breast cancer as compared to primary tumors of the breast. Molecular functions and down-regulation of GLYAT may be important for metastasis of primary tumor-derived cancer cells to the brain in humans with metastatic breast cancer.